February 15, 2010

The freedom ride of a lifetime...

On May 4, 1961, an integrated group of "Freedom Riders" left Washington D.C. for Louisiana on a Greyhound bus to challenge segregation throughout the Deep South. After the Freedom Riders’ bus was fire bombed in Alabama—with them inside--- and they nearly were killed, hundreds of other brave Riders put their lives in jeopardy to carry out the mission. I recently sat down with Daniel Stevens, a Freedom Rider who spent the summer of 1961 on a journey that would change the course of his life. Stevens, a 67-year-old Hyde Park resident, was arrested on July 7, 1961. He was 19 and a student at a small, predominately white Quaker college in Ohio. This is his story:

My last two years of high school in Saginaw, Michigan, were relative normalcy. I had a girl friend and nobody knew I was gay. Life was sane. I graduated and went on to study at Wilmington College, a small Quaker college, just north of Cincinnati.

In the spring of my freshman year, during a conference on race, I found myself sitting across the table from a friend who was attending nearby Wilberforce University, then known as Central State College. We exchanged addresses, and later that year as I was working in Saginaw to help create a library for a local college up north, I got a letter from him. He was in jail.

"We have light, food and water," he said. "Come on down!"

What else could one do? Either I could continue the banal existence of doing mindless grunt work, or I could go change the world. I have never looked back.

I told my mother that I wanted to participate in the Freedom Rides and she called a fellow who was the head of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) in Ann Arbor.

We did some preparation work. In Dearborn, Michigan, we went to a restaurant to test whether blacks were being served. In Cincinnati, we picketed another restaurant. In Montgomery, Alabama, we role played and practiced nonviolent resistance by learning how not to respond to racist taunts and jeers.

Finally, we made our way to a Trailways bus station in Montgomery for the four-hour trip to Jackson, Mississippi.

There were eight of us and we had to stand in the aisle the entire trip because the bus was crowded with other passengers.

One guy on the bus was angry and asked me why, as a white person, I was participating. I told him that if the point was integration, it took two races. He wasn’t happy with that answer and didn’t think it was funny. When my fellow Freedom Riders and I got off the bus in Jackson, the police were waiting for us at the depot. We walked into the “Colored Only” waiting area and we all were arrested---blacks and whites. I spent a week in the Jackson city jail before being transferred to Mississippi’s notorious Parchman penitentiary. We were stripped of our clothes and given a pair of boxer shorts, which is all I wore during my entire five-week stay.

There was no reading material except for two letters from home a week. We stayed in a large field house in a room that was like a dormitory. Because many of us were students or professors, we held classes and put on improvisational theater to pass the time.

Midway through my stay, as another rider was being placed in detention for arguing with a guard, I volunteered with many others to go into detention too, and in we went. From within the jail, we were able to play "fill the jail." We had come there to fill the jail and overwhelm the system.

Inside the cell, there were no mattresses on the metal bunks and there was only one roll of toilet paper per cell, which also served as a pillow for the inmates.

Most of our meals consisted of lukewarm beans but toward the end of our jail time, the prison officials served us salty ham and eggs for breakfast. It was their warped way of trying to make the time spent seem less onerous.

After the Freedom Ride, I was a Socialist for a year. I continued working on voter registration drives and engaged in other protests, including for gay rights.

In two years I had met the love of my life. In 1967, I moved with my job---I was then a Greyhound ticket agent--- and my lover to San Francisco. Four months too late for the "Summer of Love," gosh darn it, but in plenty of time for the high baroque of the early 1970s.

At one point, we owned a successful candle making business, which we sold to one of our most loyal customers. Now, in retirement, I teach music over the Internet.

I can say that the Freedom Ride changed my life. Before the ride, I was in a world that people made for me. Afterward---it was like hatching out of an egg--- I realized I could change the world, and re-make my own.

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